Monday, September 1, 2008

This is the first part which serves as the foundation of all our SEO discussions. You must understand the concepts and perform the task even if you feel that you know them or they are very basic. We will be focusing first how Google works. But before going deeper into SEO secrets, you should know some common terms used in SEO. These are the terms which are most commonly misunderstood by beginners.

Rank, ranking : a websites actual position in the free(unpaid) section of a search engine results page for a specified keyword/term. When someone claims that his site is number one in Google, you need to know for which search term/keyword.

PageRank : Commonly know as PR. Google’s patented system for specifying a web page’s importance. PageRank(PR) is a single important factor that influences ranking. Many people confuse a page’s rank ( what position are they on a search results page ) with a page’s PageRank(PR) value. They are totally different.

Page Title: The title of a web page is contained inside the < title > < /title > tags at the beginning of an HTML file. It is displayed at the top corner of every browser.

Keywords: are words and phrases that defines what a web page is all about. When someone searched a particular term or phrase into google, it tries to find those web pages that matches the search word or phrase best.

On-Page Factors : SEO factors that affects the rank that is associated with elements on your website, such as content, code, navigational links and title tags.

Off-Page Factors : SEO factors that influence the rank associated with the elements on other websites, primarily links that points to your site.

Googles Importance and How it Works

Google is the most used, most prominent and most important search engine of all. It provides results to other partner search engines and directories. This means getting the top rank in Google will most likely rank you #1 in its partner sites as well. This is not a guarantee though because they tend to blend their results a little bit so the results across its partners may not be the same.

With its partners included, Google is responsible for powering 70% of all search engine traffic to websites. This is the reason why you should focus your promotion first on Google.

Google, like any other search engines uses automated software to read, analyze, compare and rank your web pages. So it is necessary to know which elements or factors Google cares about, and how important this factors are in relation to each other.